gzip-0.5

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2 total messages Started by Doug Acker Wed, 30 Dec 1992 05:20

#1181

Author: Doug Acker
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 05:20

7 lines
472 bytes

Try compress an empty file ...


i.e.   touch foo
       gzip foo

you get foo.z that is 20 bytes big .....

gzip-0.5

#1193

Author: Richard Stallman
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 20:46

29 lines
1375 bytes

   Resent-Date: Tue, 29 Dec 92 23:20:41 CST
   Resent-Message-Id: <9212310309.AA06571@raisin-nut>
   Date: Tue, 29 Dec 92 23:20:41 CST
   From: dla@se05.wg2.waii.com (Doug Acker)
   Sender: gnulists@ai.mit.edu
   Resent-From: bug-gnu-utils-request@prep.ai.mit.edu

   Try compress an empty file ...

   i.e.   touch foo
	  gzip foo

   you get foo.z that is 20 bytes big .....

Perhaps it could be smaller than 20 bytes,
but it must be nonempty, since it needs to have
at least a magic number saying what compression format
is used.

compress sometimes refuses to compress a file if the output
is larger than the input.  This is very bad design.
It makes the program unpredictable, unreliable.
People can normally tell just by the file name that a file
is already compressed.

As for empty files, people are not likely to lose a lot of disk space
by compressing empty files.  It is not an important issue.

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